They thought their daring hotel robbery scheme was airtight, but three men are about to learn that nothing is that simple at the Hotel Reina.

To rob the finest resort in fascist Spain, three Americans need to blend in among the Mediterranean elite. And to do so, they will each need a gorgeous girl as cover. They find a depraved millionaire, a drug-addled nymphomaniac, and an assistant hotel manager who enjoys mingling with her handsome guests after hours.

The would-be thieves have used an IBM supercomputer to plan the perfect heist. Their crime has been calculated to the last detail, with every possible contingency planned for, save one: the women. The Hotel Reina is crawling with femmes fatales, and these crooks will be lucky to escape with the shirts on their backs.

Mistaken for a secret agent, a hapless lawyer scrambles to stay alive.

An arms dealer in Copenhagen dies after sipping a poisoned martini. An American diplomat in Lisbon is shot in the back of the head. A Frenchman survives being pushed in front of a train, only to be murdered in his hospital bed. Though seemingly unconnected, these events are part of an international conspiracy that could spell death for Roger Carr.

Carr is a lawyer, but he has no love for Lady Justice. A dilettante playboy sent to France on a cushy assignment, he lands himself right in the middle of an international arms deal. Both sides of the conflict have mistaken him for an agent, and the secret service interventions of a dozen countries will do anything to secure him—dead or alive.

When he finds clues to an ancient treasure, an Egyptologist plans a very modern heist.

Brilliant Egyptologist Harold Barnaby has discovered a message hidden inside a particularly difficult set of hieroglyphics. It just may lead him to a secret tomb holding the greatest riches of the ancient world. Barnaby could put his name to the most fantastic archaeological find of the century. But he doesn’t just want to dig it up. He wants to steal it.

With the help of a smuggler, a thief, and an English lord, he plans his heist. They find that tomb raiding is trickier than they thought, and those who steal from dead Egyptians face dangers worse than a mummy’s ancient curse.

A smuggler takes a job protecting London’s most despicable businessman.

Charles Raynaud feels at home in the jungle. A snake trapper, he makes a tidy profit selling poisonous creatures to the zoos of Europe, but it isn’t just the snake trade that pays his bills. Raynaud is the finest artifact smuggler the world has ever known, and his particular talents are about to be put to the test.

Between jobs in Paris, Raynaud meets an old drinking buddy. One of London’s wealthiest, nastiest men, Richard Pierce has eyes on his late father’s fortune and wants Raynaud to act as his bodyguard until he acquires it. But after the first attempts on Pierce’s life, Raynaud begins to smell a rat. Has he been hired as a bodyguard, or a target?

While vacationing in Spain, a young doctor finds himself embroiled in a deadly conflict between rival gangs.

Peter Ross just wanted a vacation. After years toiling in the radiology department of a large American hospital, he dreams of lying on a Spanish beach with a beautiful girl. The beach proves just as lovely as he hoped. But the girl turns out to be trouble.

Angela Locke is on the run from a pair of gangs waging war over a missing artifact, and she sucks Ross straight into the crossfire. From sunny Spain to rain-swept Paris, Ross’s trip will take him into Europe’s darkest corners. An ordinary man on the run for his life, he must uncover a centuries-old secret, or risk becoming its next victim.

To uncover the secrets of a superdrug, a doctor must go undercover and risk it all.

When a Hell’s Angel is thrown from his bike at 110 miles per hour, he should probably end up in the morgue. But this Angel survives his crash without a scratch, and ends up sleeping peacefully in the hospital. When Dr. Roger Clark inspects him, he finds only one defect: blue urine. Similar reports start to trickle in from hospitals upstate. It seems that a strange new drug is sending people into comas, and only Clark can unravel its mystery.

His search for answers takes him on the strangest trip of his life, into a place called “Eden,” which looks like paradise, but feels like hell.

To recover a sunken yacht, a diver must enter the world’s most dangerous waters.

The Grave Descend lies under more than sixty feet of clear blue Caribbean water, guarded by a coral reef and schools of hungry hammerhead sharks. Raising it would be a near-impossible task, but James McGregor is suited to the impossible. An expert diver, he makes his living exploring sunken ships. But there’s something strange about the wreck of the Grave Descend.

How did she sink? Why do none of the survivors tell the same story? And what was the cargo inside her hull? To answer these questions, McGregor will have to contend with the deadliest sharks around—both underwater and on land.

When a nerve gas shipment goes missing, the nation’s fate hangs in the balance.

John Graves is a State Department intelligence agent who made his name on the front lines of the Cold War. Since then, he’s been transferred to domestic work, and his love for the job has withered away. All that sustains him is the hunt for John Wright—a crazed millionaire who is about to unleash the greatest domestic threat Graves’s agency has ever faced.

When seven mobsters rob a U.S. Army train in the middle of the Utah desert and make off with half a ton of the deadliest nerve gas known to man, Graves believes that Wright is involved. His plan: to detonate the weapon in San Diego during the Republican National Convention—an attack that would kill more than one million Americans, including the president. Stopping Wright will take more than police work. It is a chess match between agent and madman, and for Graves, checkmate is not an option.

In His Own Words

I began writing as a medical student, and felt that I would continue as a doctor and ought to protect my patients from the fear that they might pop up in the pages of a thriller. The best protection would not be to disguise them, but to disguise me. Once I decided not to practice medicine, I dropped the pseudonyms expect for convenience. I wrote too much, so I decided to publish some books under false names, and in that way, could publish more books.

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From the Official Archives

“The Crichton Strain” – BinaryReviewTime magazine, May 8, 1972

In His Own Words

My feeling about the Lange books is that my competition is in-flight movies. One can read the books in an hour and a half and be more satisfactorily amused than watching Doris Day. I write them fast and the reader reads them fast and I get things off my back.

Behind the Scenes of Pursuit

Michael wrote an article for TV Guide magazine called: “What happened when an author became a director and found himself dealing with two old pros”. Here is an excerpt:

“At one point, E.G. had to make a maniacal political speech. Before we shot, he said, “I do a lot of speaking around the country for health-care legislation. I’ll just do this the way I normally do.” I was horrified: he’s so reasonable, so persuasive. He put his hand on my arm. “I’m just kidding,” he said. I relaxed enough to suggest he do it as if he were a well-known rabid political figure. He said fine.

The cameras rolled and E.G. Marshall turned into a madman. His eyes glowed, he pounded the podium; he was unquestionably insane, and very disturbing to watch. When the shot was finished, he stood back and chuckled. “How was that?” he said.

The next day, when I saw the film, I realized that he had in fact used all the mannerisms, the gestures and movements, of the political figure I’d mentioned.

Ben was equally astounding. He wore glasses, placing a terrible technical burden on him. Often he couldn’t move his head at all, or his glasses would catch the lights. It never impaired his performance.

At one point we were shooting in the airport. Ben was among a crowd of passengers arriving from a flight. I wanted the camera to single him out in this crowd, and follow him. We tried it, but the camera operator couldn’t find Gazzara. Afterward, I said, “Ben, the camera can’t find you.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.”

“Yeah, but don’t you want …”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

And he did. Don’t ask me how.

“What happened when an author became a director and found himself dealing with two old pros” by Michael CrichtonTV Guide magazine, November 25, 1972

In His Own Words

Eleven months after Barry Diller at ABC gave the go-ahead, Pursuit was finished. It was planned, shot, looped, edited, scored and dubbed; it was all over. I had made a lot of mistakes and the picture showed most of them (at least to me, having seen it more than a hundred times). But I remain enthusiastic about it, grateful to the actors and crew who kept me out of trouble and eager to do it again.

Orson Wells once said that movies were the best set of electric trains a boy ever had. He was right.

In His Own Words

I had never directed anything before Pursuit, a movie for television based on a book (Binary) I had written. Like all new directors, I wanted to do something a little bit different. The story was unusual enough: a race against the clock between a madman who wants to nerve-gas a political convention and the government agent who has to stop him. The film takes place over a single day, with lots of action and a certain amount of violence.

I was very nervous and fully aware of my incompetence to do what I was telling everybody I could do. On the first day of shooting, the insurance doctor took my blood pressure. It was 160/115, which is high enough to whisk you straight to a hospital bed. E.G. Marshall (playing the madman) and Ben Gazzara (playing the government agent) found this very amusing. I found nothing amusing at all. I had admired these men for years. Inside me was a tiny screaming voice: You’re going to tell these guys what to do? Are you out of your mind?

Book Covers

Binary by John Lange, 1972

Binary by John Lange, 1972

Drug of Choice by John Lange, 1969

Drug of Choice by John Lange, 1969

Easy Go by John Lange, 1972

Easy Go by John Lange, 1968

Grave Descend by John Lange, 1972

Grave Descend by John Lange, 1970

Odds On by John Lange, 1966

Odds On by John Lange, 1966

Scratch One by John Lange, 1974

Scratch One by John Lange, 1967

The Venom Business by John Lange, 1971

The Venom Business by John Lange, 1969

Zero Cool by John Lange, 1972

Zero Cool by John Lange, 1969

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